if reporting them to someone would be a really, really good idea. This has gone way beyond careless or absurd. This is either incomprehensible incompetence, or deliberate malpractice, if I can use that word for medical billing. The way they’ve handled your husband, ie “pay before you get your needed services” after he’d already paid, that almost qualifies as a shake-down or flat out extortion. And if they’re doing it to you, when they know you’re watching so carefully, what are they doing to others? What are they doing to reporting to the various federal agencies for compensation? And where is that money going? Are they lining their own nests with it?
I don’t know if medical billers are licensed in any way, but if they were CPA’s they’d lose their licensing over this. If nothing else, a call to the BBB to report that whole office as a bunch of “creative mathematicians” might be in order. If you want to go higher on the food chain, a report to the state attorney general for large-scale commercial wrong-doing would probably get someone’s attention. The OK Dept of Medical licensing may also be interested, since the doctors must know by now that their billing practices are incompetent and they’ve done nothing to correct the problem.

struggling the most with not eating out, but we are getting better with it. It is just so easy to grab something when you are out and about it is too tempting, but we are getting better.

3 Stooges update: received a “corrected” statement from them yesterday and…you guessed it the thing was still wrong.

This time they entirely dropped dh’s original visit off of the statement, which would be fine since insurance has paid it in full. Only they also dropped nearly $50 worth of payments we made on that visit as well as $35 worth of payments we made on another paid in full by insurance off the statement. So a total of roughly $85 worth of payments are not applied anywhere. Call me picky, but when I pay a bill I expect to get credit for the payments. The gal tried to tell me that insurance hadn’t paid those two bills in full because of our co-pay, only there is no co-pay with this doctor. I also have the statements from BCBS showing they paid the full amount.

So…they are going to send me another corrected statement. Hey, if they want to keep wasting their postage and time sending out incorrect stuff then so be it. I have made it VERY clear to them I am not paying off the balance until all payments by both us and and insurance have been applied in full.

She said something like “I’m getting this loan to get caught up.” She says she has another loan she’s had for 7 months and paid on time.
Me: you’re going into debt to pay off debt??
Her: no, I’m just trying to get caught up.
Me: so you’re borrowing money to pay off debt??

Apparently her previous job didn’t pay much, so she got behind on rent. And she thinks it’s a good idea to borrow money($500) to catch up on her rent, so her credit score looks better. Or something like that – the whole idea seemed stupid to me. At that point I told her, “Well I don’t borrow money, so…” And I left it at that. I could tell from just that 1/2 minute conversation that she had bought into the “but you NEED to borrow money to survive” mentality. And as bad as I was bowling I didn’t even feel like trying to convince her otherwise…

and not your debt free mentality getting in the way of a good deal. If the seller won’t lower the price or give you money towards the land being deeded to the neighbor, and quickly, I would run the other way. Sometimes things happen for a reason, so your perfect plot might be out there and the universe is working magic to get you there.

Seriously, when buying our house, dh and I had our hearts SET on one place. It appeared shiny and beautiful, one of those too-good-to-be-true deals where the seller supposedly gutted and completed rehabbed it. Well just after our offer was submittied it was declined because they had something better, but about two months later they called us right back and said they’d take our offer afterall. We thought it was very odd they just declined our offer without countering, said they had another buyer offer much more, and then came crawling back. Well, we had already fallen in love again with a better house and we moved on. We found out later, the seller was hiding some issues. I don’t know exactly what, but it was enough to scare away someone!

So, I dont know – but I have always believed some things seem unfair at first, but they do happen for a reason.

Rent for awhile and look for the perfect land, them put the tiny house you want on it, while still renting. That way dd has the stability she needs, you have the home you want, you aren’t opening a rotten kettle of fish over the property line and you won’t be being pushed into possible future problems. Jan who has trouble trimming posts on her phone in OK

At least not in Florida! We were in a very similar situation with the Florida payday loans laws when we went to sell our house in Florida Springs years ago. Only upon selling the house did we find out that ours encroached on the neighbor’s lot by 50 square feet. (Long story but a perfectly innocent occurrence.) In addition to getting our neighbor to agree to sell us the property we were already using, we had to have a new subdivision plotted and recorded to be able to get that tiny bit deeded to us. The whole neighborhood had to be canvassed and given the opportunity to object to the boundary change. Luckily our realtor was a superstar as we were 1200 miles away in California and our buyers really wanted the house and hung with us during the months-long process (they were renting the house from us until it was resolved).
I’d look into the adverse possession laws in FL to see what rights your neighbor has.

or something like that, couldn’t you just offer a lower amount? The property is by all measure smaller than what was advertised. If you still like the land, I’d see if you can get the seller to reduce the cost and give the easement to the neighbor, although I’d probably mention it to the neighbor too. I’m surprised the seller hasn’t had that conversation already.

The neighbor who is on the eastern border of the property somehow managed to build 1/4 of their home on “our” side of the property line, and 1/2 of their detached garage. Then “someone” put up a chain link fence so it “looks like” (until you get a survey done) that the house and detached garage are all on “their” side of the property line.

The aerial view of the developer plat lines shows it clearly. We are having a survey done (at seller expense) to find out where the true property line is, but since the (current) seller didn’t bother to get a survey done when ‘he’ bought it (it’s commonly a buyer expense in Texas) I’m pretty sure the survey is going to come back that the neighbor has built on ‘our’ property.

That means our options (legally) are:

1. walk away from the deal
2. get money from the neighbor for the property (likely not going to happen, and what a way to start a war)
3. grant the neighbor an easement (for free) and cure the title for that section of land over to him.
4. get money from the seller so we can do #3 and proceed with the sale

I don’t know when the build happened, but I’m pretty sure it’s been that way since as long as the seller has owned, which is 11 years. I don’t what the law is in Texas, but in California, if you have something like that happen and let it go for 7 years without contesting, then at 7 years and 1 day you have effectively lost the property. I would imagine it’s something similar in Texas (goes back to homesteading laws) so even if we were inclined to go to court we would lose and have to grant an easement anyway.

We “could” keep looking, but at this point if we ended up walking away, we would just wait until we got to Texas and found work and start the process over then, rather than continue to do it long distance. I’m kind of over realtors who won’t get off their duff until after an offer is made and now their commission is on the line.

I have known several families who went the “buy land, live in an RV/cabin/shack, then build as we have time/money/energy” road, and suffice to say it’s a helluva lot harder to do than anyone expects. Figure out how long you think it’ll take to build your house with the materials/time/energy you expect to have, then multiply by four (at least). For instance, if you think it’ll take a year, expect that four years later you’ll still be trying to finish. I’ve seen more than one family never actually finish, and/or move or disintegrate before they could finish. Just from the handful of folks we know who went that route, only 1 in 5 actually succeeded in having a house they enjoyed when it was all said and done. Sobering statistics.
I would be curious to know what the ‘defect’ is, and what you are being told it would take to ‘fix’ it. That defect could explain why the house is ‘embarrassingly’ inexpensive. Many folks don’t want the hassle of such hoops to jump through, so this might be like a fixit car that just needs some moderate repair and then would be good for another 50,000 miles. Or, it could be a serious problem that can’t actually be fixed. We came very close to buying a nice parcel of farmland back when we were in the market, and the seller mentioned something about “needing to clean up the title first” prior to sale. We started to investigate, and that rabbit hole just went deeper and deeper. Turned out the seller had no fewer than six active lawsuits pending, all of which had liens on the land. It would have cost us a fortune to get out of that, and the seller was apparently about to get into another lawsuit even while we were negotiating. Apparently he was the argumentative type, and we found out later he was selling the land to pay his legal fees for these arguments he just couldn’t walk away from. Yet the legal issues kept him from selling. Talk about a Catch-22. Some problems need effort to fix and then they’re done. Others need effort to clean up and will never be done. I’d do careful research on this one before choosing.
You do have another option here; keep looking. You don’t have to limit yourself to just the above two choices. I know it’s hard when you’re just desperate to get out of the situation you’re in. But if at all possible, make sure you’re not going from the frying pan into the fire. DR does point out that a mortgage is one of the few things which most folks legitimately cannot afford to avoid except after they’re already down the financial freedom trail quite a ways. Holding out for a mortgage-free life may cost you in other ways. If the above two options are both too much hassle to realistically choose, keep looking. We found this place after walking away from Mr Six Lawsuits, and we’ve been here ever since. So there’s no reason to settle for Plan #1 or Plan #2 if neither of them really work.

Need some perspective here. We just found out yesterday that there is likely a material defect in the title, which has to be cured. If it’s not cured now, by the current seller, it will have to be cured later, by us.

It’s material enough that it would allow us to back out of the deal.

Which would allow us to either (a) move to Texas and rent til we have enough to pay cash for a house (which would happen WAY sooner there than here in CA) or (b) pay cash for some land, buy an RV and live in it (and off grid) and build as we have the funds to do so.

Now personally, I would choose option B, but as you know, I have a DD18 whose anxiety level would probably go right through the roof in that environment, so I’d probably have to figure out something more rapid in a build it scenario.

Regardless, my real question is: am I using the very real problem with the Title as an excuse to get out of the deal (which is so cheap/affordable it’s embarrassing) “just because” the idea of going from near zero debt to $65k is freaking me out ??????

Stayed home instead of traveling on the long weekend (the guys had Good Friday off). Did a wienie roast here at home instead.

Paid a chunk on the medical bills. Celebrated discovering not only are we now 100% covered on all medical procedures, but on our prescriptions as well when dh’s refills were free.

Ordered original factory car parts for the two trucks from amazon for less than half of what they cost locally. One part came and the guys did what was going to be a $500 plus parts repair on ds’ truck for under $30 and it took them less than 15 minutes to change the parts out. Our truck part should be here this weekend.

Dh had, what we hope is his final needed medical testing on Friday—it was free thanks to insurance. Now we are waiting on the results. Good thoughts please this is the one that has had me really anxious.

Paid a small quarterly bill that some how had slipped through the budget, won’t make that mistake twice. Luckily I had enough excess in the fuel budget I could cover it without upsetting the apple cart.

So DH works for this company who demands everyone pay for business travel on their own CCs and then get reimbursed, a policy that DH has fought ever since he started working there. Most of the time he is successful.

Then when he started renting cars, it started to become a hassle, so he went and got a Capital One (don’t say it) CC with a $300 limit. Yes, it gets paid off within 2 weeks after he returns from a trip, and he has been good about only using it for reimbursable travel expenses.

Ironically, during one of those trips, the balance got reported to the credit bureaus, which of course looks like a 67% utilization ratio, even though it’s now been paid off for almost a month.

So we complained to Capital One. They did the standard apology, it takes a while for everything to get reported….

AND THEN RAISED HIS CREDIT LIMIT TO $2300, “so a $200 balance will only report as 10% immediately, not 67%”

Well ya gotta give ’em points for trying. And no, I’m not telling DH they raised his credit limit.